r describes the evolution of the Jewish presence in Western Europe by the eighteenth century as "organized on the basis of corporate autonomy" (5), which allowed the state to "reach" them for tax purposes and subject them to special laws or restrictions meant to highlight their alien status in mainstream culture (or more exactly make them pay for it), while allowing them to administer laws according to Jewish custom. Sachar finds irony in the fact that the earliest ghettoes had been requested by the Jews themselves, as a survival strategy in communities where hostility could easily be transformed into mob violence. Gradually, the foundational theory of the ghetto was appropriated from the Jews by the dominant culture, to be transformed from the status of autonomous haven meant to keep hostile forces out, into the status of locked and walled prison compound, meant to keep the Jews confined, unable to travel freely or in many cases leave the ghetto at all except on business. Inevitably, the physical environment of the ghettoes was oppressive and cramped, with the civil authority functioning more or less as gatekeeping quarantine slumlord from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.
The isolation of Jews in rural Eastern as opposed to comparatively urban Western Europe arose not from their physical ghettoization but from their confinement to all-Jewish villages and towns. But the perception of the Jew's alien status was nonetheless a profound fact. The common thread running through the evolving perception of the Jews in Europe was that they were considered non-European and undoubtedly non-Christian. Their origins as a people in the Eastern Mediterranean confirmed this, but the ethnic or racial character of Jewish alien status appears to have been less important in the collective European mind than the alienation of culture and the stubborn persistence of the Jews in monotheistic but premessianic piety. What Sachar says of the rural Polis...